Population density and house size

By Sackerson.

James Higham reproduces a graphic from Amfortas re house size in selected countries:

... which got me thinking.

I looked up the ratio of arable land per person (average of 2009-11), and then added Amfortas' statistics:

As you see, the smaller the amount of arable land per capita, the smaller the house - except for Australia, which is still a young country in terms of immigration and development, and also has limited water resources.

Taking it one step further, I divided the house size by the arable land per person:

 

We now have two outliers, Australia and the UK. The real story here, I think: Britain is far too crowded and dependent on imported food.


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In praise of Patrick O'Flynn

This wide-ranging article by the Daily Express' chief political commentator covers many aspects of the broad crisis that led me to start blogging. My interest is not money per se, but about the fate of our country, and here Patrick O'Flynn unrolls a map of our problems, including:

• The rise of the East
• The growing power of foreign authoritarian regimes
• The purchase of British enterprises by foreign sovereign wealth funds, and the consequent export of our future dividend income
• Increasing foreign-held UK public debt (again, more income exported)
• Our vulnerability to energy repricing, and inadequate energy security
• Inflation in food and fuel
• Our unbalanced national budget, what with the cost of unemployment, and rising costs in other social benefits such as the NHS
• Inefficiency in the public sector
• The UK's squandering of its North Sea oil opportunity (cf. Norway's £300 billion investment fund)
• British economic decline, and our deterioriating manufacturing base

He concludes: "...the decade ahead will be full of challenges. Britain will have to aggressively earn its living in the world once more and those with nothing to offer will be offered nothing in return."

Spot on. But it's still tucked away on page 12 in yesterday's paper edition, well after Madeleine McCann and Amy Winehouse. This stuff should be hitting the front page all the time, because long after we've forgotten the celeb victims of today, we'll be counting the cost of our government's political and economic negligence and incompetence.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall

Michael Panzner refers us to a Financial Times article on the (overdue) dwindling confidence among our youngster trading community. The piece includes this paragraph:

Unlike past housing crises, the banking sector is far less well equipped to cope with the fallout because of the wave of banking consolidation in the last decade. [...] This means the pain has become concentrated among a small handful of institutions, all of whom play a crucial role in keeping all markets liquid.

I recently quoted this Contrary Investor article, which includes a graph of the ballooning exposure of American banks to credit default swaps (CDS), under which arrangement everybody insures everybody else. The risk is 99%+ concentrated into only SIX banks.

Who benefits from such concentrations? I commented on Panzner's site:

Concentration of finance into an ever-smaller number of giant banks is inherently dangerous. You reduce the risks of small hazards, but you increase the potential damage from a Black Swan / fat tail event. Systemic safety is in diversity, dispersion and disconnection.

There is increasingly a conflict of interest between those who benefit from concentrations of power and wealth (think of the bonuses and cushy jobs), and the general populace. Wasn't the US Constitution itself specifically designed to prevent such concentrations?

In my view, the sub-prime contagion is not only spreading to other sectors of the economy, but beginning to call into question how big government, high finance and monstrous companies impact on the fundamental values of our (systematic and real in the USA, ramshackle and sham here in the UK) democracies.

It seems to me that small-scale democracy-cum-economy is not only an historical reaction to the centralist authoritarianism of George III (who meant well, I am sure), but a kind of imitation of Nature, which has endured the most massive disruptions (a planet encased in ice, or burning from a massive meteor strike) because of my alliterative trio of survival traits: diversity, dispersion and disconnection.

A small town in Germany

The TV was on, and I forget what programme we were watching. Sometimes they were Dutch - we were near the border - but more often German. I was eleven, and would watch anything. Even the adverts were fun, linked by shorts featuring little cartoon characters, the Mainzelmännchen. HB cigarettes, Allianz insurance, Bear condensed milk ("Nichts geht über Bärenmarke……Bärenmarke zum Kaffee!")

Then a newsflash cut in: the President of the USA had been shot on a visit to Dallas and had been rushed to hospital. My father went upstairs. The programme resumed.

My father came down. I still remember him buckling his belt over his uniform, as ever uncomfortable and determined to do his best, a stocky man with a straight back, now full of tension. He watched with us as another newsflash came: the President was dead.

I think the camp sent a driver with a Jeep; in any case, Dad was gone. We watched some more TV, interrupted by occasional updates and speculation. Then it was time for bed. Flannel pyjamas, cotton sheets, the heavy blankets that trapped your feet. I went to sleep.

Lights woke me, illuminating the curtains. Heavy engines, headlights passing, heading in the direction of Düsseldorf. One after another after another. Now, I know they were tank transporters, racing to position the heavy armour in readiness for the Red invasion.

And now there are no more Communists, or so it seems. We buy fuel from the Russians, hardware and toys from the Chinese. The people my father, a gentle and sensitive man, was prepared to die fighting, are our friends and trading partners. As reported by The Independent, Chinese interests even supported our Conservative leader and former Prime Minister, Edward Heath (Sir Edward protested the following week, saying the claims were "misleading and inaccurate" - but did not go so far as to say that they were untrue). Surely, we're all friends now. After all, Dad had helped the Germans start to rebuild their country; he'd worked with German civilians, learned to speak the language fluently, married a German refugee. Wars happen, and so does peace. The people of the world are vexed by their leaders, yet love for one another endures and triumphs.

But Communism is not a nation, and does not love people. Everything, even its own most ardent supporters, can be burned on the altar of abstract principle. Informed that a general nuclear war would kill a third of humankind, Mao said good, then there would be no more classes.

And dictators, dressed in a little brief authority, ignore warnings. On the eve of World War II, when the conflict could yet be averted, Hitler was with guests in Berchtesgaden when the clouds over the mountains assumed an ominous red and yellow appearance. A woman told him "Das bedeutet blut, und mehr blut" ("This means blood, and more blood"); Hitler trembled, but then said if it must be so, it must be so.

As gypsies and beggars used to sing:

So proud and lofty is some sort of sin
Which many take delight and pleasure in
Whose conversation God doth much dislike
And yet He shakes His sword before He strike

(The Watersons performed it on "Frost and Fire", which our English teacher played to us in the late Sixties. I associate it with cold, freshness, the musty fragrance of the Monmouthshire woods, animism, hope.)

By degrees, this brings me to the current state of affairs. Our leaders wish us to believe that the history of our fathers is at an end, and now only efficient administration remains to be achieved. The revels of democracy are ended; they were fun, but their time is past.

No: as Christopher Fry said, "affairs are soul size", still. Although I do believe that sudden and total conversion is possible, as in James Shirley's now implausible-seeming play "Hyde Park" (who would have believed the Earl of Rochester's conversion? - and there are those who still doubt it, not knowing how the sinner hates sin), I doubt that all who worked with the old Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes have abandoned their principles and plans. Like the remark about the significance of the French Revolution (variously attributed to Chou En-Lai and Mao Tse-Tung), it's "too early to say".

Even if our leaders should be gullible or merely suborned, Jeffrey Nyquist reminds us again that there are still people who think differently from us, and we must be prepared. It is not all right to be weak, whether militarily or in our economies. Good fences (and good borders) make good neighbours.

Gold and liberty

Fear, and the resentment of the oppressed, are more dangerous than bullish aggression.

I watched a programme last night about how we very nearly had the Third World War in 1983. This was a time when Russia was especially paranoid about the West's military intentions - spies were even ordered to report how many lights were on in late evening at the Ministry of Defence in London, apparently not knowing that the offices were lit so the cleaners could do their work.

Then in September, a Soviet spy satellite, fooled by sunlight reflecting off high-level cloud, reported not one, but five missile launches from America. The Russian monitor on duty ignored the klaxon and flashing screen, backed his judgment and told his superiors it was a false alarm, for which he was ultimately discharged from the Army. Wikipedia says his name is Stanislav Petrov. He's certainly worth more than the $1,000 the Association of World Citizens could afford to award him. We may owe him our lives.

Looking for updates on the gold dinar, I came across this blog by a Pakistani, in which he looks to the Islamic dinar as a way of breaking the enslavement of the world by a fiat-currency banking cartel. Irrespective of whether he's justified in his analysis of the situation, or reasonable in his hopes for such a currency, we should note the victim-perception. I seem to recall a maxim (from Sun Tzu?) that you should fear a weak enemy.

Which brings us back to the economic vulnerability of the UK and USA. Weakness can invite aggression, but also makes the weak fear an attack even when it isn't coming. Worryingly for a potential aggressor, weakness may be feigned:

22. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. ("Laying Plans")

I don't think you can truly be free until you are strong and independent. We need to get our houses in order, so we can deal with others from a secure base - which is safer for all involved.